The purpose of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) is to remove restrictions on the employment of disabled individuals. Your hiring procedures -- application forms, interview techniques, examinations, and job descriptions -- all can leave you vulnerable to ADA liability if you don''t have a clear sense of your obligations.
The following suggestions offer guidance on how to identify and address
possible problems in the way you conduct you´re hiring and may help protect you
from ADA liability.
Recruiting techniques
Job advertisements
- Do your job advertisements and
postings refer only to essential job requirements?
- Have you excluded references to
nonessential or marginal qualifications?
- Have you included both a phone
number and an address to which inquiries can be sent?
Recruitment
- If you will be recruiting off-site
-- at a college campus, for example -- is it accessible to disabled
applicants?
- Is your place of employment
accessible to disabled applicants?
Job descriptions
- If you have written job
descriptions for your employees, are they clear and unambiguous? If you
need to claim that a disabled applicant cannot perform the essential tasks
of the job with or without a reasonable accommodation, the description of
those tasks must be clear and specific.
Application and interview
- Your application form should ask
questions that address only the requirements and functions of the job.
Steer clear of questions about an applicant''s history of workers'' compensation
claims, hospitalization for illness, or treatment by a psychiatrist or
psychologist.
- Keep the interview focused on the
job''s specific tasks and whether the applicant can perform the essential
duties.
Exams
- If you use examinations in your hiring
process, you don''t have to lower the minimum score for disabled
applicants. You should be prepared, however, to provide reasonable
accommodations -- for example, a Braille form of the test, a reader, or
access to the test site for applicants with mobility difficulties.
Documentation
- If you need to reject a disabled
applicant, make the rejection as clear as possible, and stress that the
decision to hire another applicant was based on qualifications and the
job''s requirements. You may deny employment to an applicant on the basis
of his disability only if it prevents him from performing the essential
job duties. Use simple, clear language to avoid misinterpretation or
confusion. Do not provide more detail than necessary.
Bottom line for employers
If your hiring
practices tend to use selection criteria that screen out disabled applicants on
the basis of that disability, they do not comply with the ADA. You are
permitted, however, to use criteria that measure an essential job function. You
must ensure that you are treating your disabled applicants in the same manner
as any other applicant with certain specific capabilities and needs.
You are not required
to lower your standards to accommodate disabled individuals, but you must be
sure that you apply the same measure to all applicants and employees in the
particular job, regardless of disability.
Copyright 2000 M. Lee
Smith Publishers LLC.
This article is an
excerpt from Rhode Island Employment Law
Letter, written by the Providence-based law firm of Powers, Kinder &
Keeney, Inc. Â Rhode Island Employment Law Letter does not attempt to offer
solutions to specific problems, but rather to provide information about current
developments in Rhode Island and federal employment law. Inquiries about
specific problems should be addressed to the labor or employment law attorney
of your choice.
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